London

What was London like around 1715?

London was the capital of the new Kingdom of Great Britain, made when England and Scotland united in 1707. Historians estimate about 575,000 people lived there in 1700 and about 675,000 by 1750. Bristol, the next big English port, had perhaps 21,000 people in 1700, so London was more than twenty times larger.

The city’s wealth came from the river. The stretch of the Thames just below London Bridge, beside the Tower of London, is called the Pool of London, and by the 1700s it was the busiest port in the world. Downstream lay the shipyards. The royal dockyard at Deptford, founded by Henry VIII in 1513, built smaller warships.

How did ships unload in the Pool of London?

There were no enclosed docks in London yet. Ships anchored in the river, and their cargoes were carried ashore in small boats. By a law of 1559, goods paying customs duty could only be landed at about twenty “Legal Quays” on the north bank between London Bridge and the Tower, under the eyes of customs officers.

The Custom House stood beside them. Christopher Wren’s Custom House was damaged by a gunpowder explosion in 1714, and Thomas Ripley rebuilt it between 1717 and 1725.

As trade grew, the quays did not. No new quay frontage was added after 1666, so ships waited their turn, cargoes could spoil and thieves helped themselves. London’s first big enclosed docks, the West India Docks, opened only in 1802.

What did London import and send on to Europe?

Britain’s navigation laws said that the most valuable colonial goods, including sugar, tobacco and rice, had to be landed in Britain before they could go anywhere else in Europe. Merchants paid duty when the goods arrived and got most of it back if they sent them abroad again.

Tobacco and sugar followed very different paths. Virginia alone shipped about 22 million pounds of tobacco to England in 1700, and much of it was re-exported to the Netherlands, France and northern Europe. Sugar, by contrast, was mostly eaten in Britain, so little was sent on. Furs came from the Hudson’s Bay Company, chartered in England in 1670 and run from England.

London did not have the trade to itself: by 1720 Scottish ports, Bristol and Liverpool together handled about 40 per cent of Chesapeake tobacco.

How was London involved in the slave trade?

London was one of the most important slave-trading ports in the world. According to London Museum Docklands, only the ships of Liverpool and of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil took more Africans into slavery than London’s did.

The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672, held England’s monopoly of trade with West Africa until 1698. Historians estimate that between 1672 and 1731 its ships carried about 187,000 enslaved people across the Atlantic, and that about 16,000 died on the way. After 1698 any English merchant could join the trade, and by 1708 the company had run out of money, so by the game’s years many voyages were made by independent traders instead. One of the company’s officials, Edward Colston, is remembered in Bristol.

The museum also explains that much of the money made from slavery ended up in London, in the City’s banks and insurance offices and in the government’s accounts. Lloyd’s, today the world-famous insurance market, says its underwriters insured British ships that carried enslaved Africans, and it apologised for this in 2020.

What was Lloyd’s Coffee House?

Edward Lloyd’s coffee house is first mentioned in 1688 in Tower Street, and in 1691 it moved to Lombard Street, in the City. It became the place for shipping news, popular with shipowners and captains. Men known as underwriters sat at its tables and sold insurance: for a fee, they agreed to pay if a ship or cargo was lost to storms, war or pirates. The famous newspaper Lloyd’s List started later, in 1734.

What was the South Sea Bubble?

The South Sea Company was founded in London in 1711 to trade with Spain’s American colonies. In 1713 it won the asiento, the Spanish contract to supply enslaved Africans to those colonies.

In 1720 the company took over a large part of the government’s debt, and people rushed to buy its shares. Their price rose from about £128 in January to over £1,000 in August, then crashed in September; by December it was back to about £124. Many investors lost their savings, and an inquiry found that government ministers had taken bribes.

Where were pirates hanged in London?

Crimes at sea were judged by the Admiralty’s courts, and pirates condemned in London were hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping, on the riverbank at the low-tide mark. By custom, their bodies were left until three tides had washed over them.

The privateer captain William Kidd, found guilty of piracy, was hanged there on 23 May 1701. The rope broke and he had to be hanged a second time. His body was then displayed at Tilbury Point, near Gravesend. In the game’s years John Gow, a sailor raised in Orkney who led a mutiny in 1724, was captured in Orkney and hanged at Execution Dock on 11 June 1725.

London also made pirate legends. In May 1724 a bookseller near St Paul’s Cathedral began selling A General History of the Pyrates by “Captain Charles Johnson”. No one knows who really wrote it, and some of its stories were exaggerated or invented, but it shaped how the world imagines Blackbeard and his rivals.

Were there Black Londoners in the 1700s?

Yes. Black people had lived in London since at least the 1600s, and the Atlantic trade brought many more. Most worked as servants: footmen, maids and pages, often brought to England by planters and merchants returning from the colonies. Others were sailors or musicians.

Their legal position was unclear, and many were held as enslaved people. London newspapers carried advertisements for people who had run away; one research project has found 836 such notices from England and Scotland between 1700 and 1779. In 1729 a legal opinion by two of the government’s lawyers said that coming to Britain did not make an enslaved person free, and from 1731 Black people in the City were barred from learning a trade.

Ignatius Sancho was brought to London as an enslaved small child around 1730. He grew up as a servant and later ran a grocer’s shop in London with his wife, Anne. His letters were published in 1782, after his death.